Repairing Science After a Theory Collapse

When a flagship psychological theory publicly unravels, the damage is not just empirical but institutional and moral: careers, public policy recommendations, and public trust are all affected. We need standardised institutional practices—pre‑registered robustness maps, mandatory post‑publication audits, and formal ‘reckoning’ protocols (narrative plus data) when widely‑adopted theories fail—to limit personal harm, restore credibility, and prevent repeat cycles of theory‑driven hype. — Setting formal, public repair procedures for high‑profile scientific collapses would protect policy users, improve reproducibility, and reduce the political fallout when influential research is overturned.